by The signal is strong this week 📡—tune in for the latest from across the hobby ➡️
Origins attendance dropped slightly this year, down about 2.5% to 18,700 attendees (total count, not day-by-day). Stats from their official post:
-
18,700 attendees
-
413 exhibitors
-
23,000 attendee badges printed -
More than 8,600 scheduled events -
8,065 games checked out from the Game Library—a 22% increase and a new record! -
99 units of blood donated through the Red Cross, enough to help 297 people -
$15,000 raised for Extra Life
Now, as was discussed back & forth on Facebook, no one can really explain why “23000 attendee badges printed” matters. If that’s supposed to be the difference between the “badges sold” vs “turnstile” attendance, but why not just use the terms that everyone in the industry already uses? Great, you printed extra badges. Who cares? Why did you print extras? People bought them but didn’t pick them up? That’s “badges sold”. People bought 2 different single-day badges instead of a full-weekend badge? That’s also “badges sold”. Why do we give a $&!% about “badges printed”?
There’s also plenty of other coverage of Origins in the world of hobby gaming “enthusiast media”
- Tabletop Bellhop
- Tantrum House
- Travel the Board: Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, Recap and Haul
- The Con Couple (yes, it’s a 4 hour podcast from their car ride), plus the Origins Complaints Bonus Episode
- An Eggcellent Time – A Retrospective of Origins Game Fair 2026
- Rolling with the Beard Origins Game Fair 2026 Recap
- Beer City Board Games: Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, Day 4, Wrapping Up
- Collin: Day 1, Day 2, Day 3
- Gaming Trend: So how was Origins? Come for the games, stay for the controversy!
RIP Airjudden, stalwart of the BGG community and longtime podcaster / vlogger with the HAMTAG folks and his recent show with Wayne Hansen
Judd was a great dude and always a positive force for the hobby gaming world.
It’s always great when we get another video essay from Amabel.
Last week, we asked you “Among the following reasons, which one is most often the top consideration when you decide what wargame to purchase (includes buying used games or committing to a pre-order/p500) ?”
Another shipment of hobby goodness has landed 📦—inventory starts here ➜
- World At War Magazine #109, with the included Burma 1945 game, has been shipped to subscribers and is now in the store
- VUCA Simulations started shipping The Far Seas for your German cruiser ops in WW1
- The Liberation of Italy: Forces on the Southern Front 1944-45 hardcover has been released for Flames of War
- Breakthrough Russia is now shipping from Compass Games, covering ’41 to ’43 on the East Front, which should be a ton of fun for the Russian player
- Paper Wars #114 with the included game Combat! The Brecourt Manor Assault is also shipping from Compass Games
- From White Dog Games and designer R Ben Madison, Fortress of Oblivion is a new solo game that covers Iran/Persia from 224-651AD
- Modiphius released Sovereign – Fall of Wormwood and all the expansions / accessories for this new tactical sci-fi card game; it’s not collectible, either – everything is in the box(es)
- Defense of Duffer’s Drift, from 1904, has been turned into a digital game, where you can ‘play’ through the turn-of-the-last-century proto-gamebook1
- This week on Wargame Vault
- From Feral Wizard, both the Battle Box Age of Sail and the Battle Box Napoleonic Wars are available as print-&-play games
- Surviving ‘Nam – An Infantryman’s Year “In Country” as a co-op/solo skirmish minis game
- Fighting Instructions is a new age of sail set of rules to get you from 1700-1790(ish)
- Warlord Games has both the Stuff Of Legends and Stuff Of Legends/Talking Miniatures Bundle of books available
- Other new releases on Steam
- No Retreat! The Russian Front 1941-1945– “Extra Features” DLC with some new optional modules
- American Revolutionary War from WDS is now on Steam
- Silesian Wars is a military 4X-ish / historical-ish game
- Cool new Mountain Dwarf Command from Alternative Armies
- Precis Intermedia released The Alien Abduction Game to see who can snatch the most cargo (among other things) while making crop circles and avoiding detection
- VUCA also started shipping an update pack for Imperial Elegy to bring original 1st edition printings up to the same standards as the revised 1st ed
- New mounted minis of Revolutionary-era French from the Vendée campaigns from Perry Miniatures
New crowdfunding campaigns have entered the arena 📣—browse at your own risk ➜
- Designing Historical Games for Classrooms – A Practical Guide for Educators is a book on pre-order
- This week’s newsletter from On Military Matters includes a bunch of books on Rome and its soldiers, as well as books on the Falklands, WW2, and aviation operations
- Two new pre-orders from VUCA Simulations
- Pacific Fleet: Rise & Fall of the Japanese Empire from designer Hiroyuki Inose
- Thirty Years of Misery a (get this!) Thirty Years War game from Brian Asklev
- This week on Kickstarter
- Supercollider, Growing Groves, The Franciscan Diamond is a 3-pack of not wargames from Valor Mountain Games that are connected to Catastrophe Games and run by Friend-of-the-Dragoons Christopher High
- Ludika: virtual tabletop board gaming platform & community just launched as a potential TTS competitor?
- Lorescape: Into Space – Sci-Fi Modular Tabletop Terrain can be used for all sorts of hex-based games
- Star Marshal: The Paper Trails is a card-driven solo game for sci-fi law enforcement
- And this week’s hopeless campaign is the same Neoimperialism board game we talked about a few weeks ago when it launched and although it’s got over a month to go, it’s barely into double-digit percentage of its goal
- Updating the current Decision Games pledge program with the “newest” on their site, in case we’d missed any of these before
- Over The Rhine: Market Garden
- A deluxe edition of American Civil War from S&T #310
- Seven Days to the Rhine consolidated from the multiple magazine games
Several prices have decided to retreat 📉—we support this decision 💵
- Summer sale is over! Back to the WDS ‘Game of the week’ and this week it’s Panzer Battles: Battles of Kursk – Southern Flank for $29.95, until Sunday
- Free League’s Summer Sale runs through 16 July and has core sets at 40% off and other things as much as 80% off
- Osprey’s July sale has games up to 70% off
- Avalanche Press has a bunch of packages of connected games on sale right now
- Build-your-own-bundle at Fanatical for the Field of Glory series of games on Steam
- Can’t beat “free”! Wargame Construction Set III: Age of Rifles 1846-1905 is free on Amazon right now; you get a code to redeem through GOG
- Kraken Dice’s July sale has a whole new set of stacking freebies
- Noble Knight has copies of Modern Battles I starting at $70
The keyboards were active this week ⌨️—and the results are here 📝
It’s not something we published, but we were selected by the Million Podcasts Network as one of the Top 80 Wargame Podcasts. The majority of the list cover minis wargames, especially Warhammer but also BattleTech and different click-base games. Two Half-Squads, Homo Ludens, and Beyond Solitaire also make appearances to help represent the counter-pushing contingent.
- Origins 2026 ~ Cosplay
- Origins 2026 ~ Exhibit Hall
- #TBT/Throwback Thursday ~ Comparative Analysis of Waterloo Games – Part 1
- Saturday Night Fights ~ “Blucher”: The Battle of Friedland
- Kriegsspiel at Origins 2026
- Men of Iron Tri-pack: Agincourt Scenario
- FL(W)GS Spotlight ~ Squirrels Nest Games of Conway, SC
- From The Armchair Dragoons Archives
- Back on 25 Aug 22, we published Classic Reviews ~ Seasons by bayonetbrant
- On 29 Apr 24, we live-streamed CO24 D2S2: Urban Warfare Wargaming: Past, Present, Future on our YouTube channel
- Gameplay this week
The Best Thing We Saw On Another Site This Week Was actually published years ago but only recently brought to our attention
Across the board, American officers of the World War I era pointed out the salutary irony that the maps they so grudgingly had studied ended up depicting the very ground over which they would fight the great campaigns of Saint-Mihiel and Meuse-Argonne in the war. Their comments, however, illustrated a more fundamental problem. At the great Army schools of the United States—and, in the case of the War College, located only a stone’s throw away from the ground on which the campaigns depicted in the memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant, William T. Sherman, and Philip H. Sheridan had been fought—students lacked proper military maps from which to study how American armies operated in their greatest of wars.
Ardwulf’s counter clipping stream (theoretically) covered ‘digitalization’ of wargames
Various news & notes from the business end of the gaming world
- This week, Scott Thorne’s column asks “Who schedules a prerelease on the Fourth of July?”
- BoardGameWire reports on a very cool open-source symbol ‘library’ to support accessibility in game design for color-blind people
- ICv2 reports on GAMA hiring a new comms director and the bets are already open on how long this one lasts 😆
- The Zweihänder RPG is going to be opening up to third-party content through a license program, although the accompanying news of handing over ZH logistics to WOGD is a little . . . odd
- Tabletop Games Jobs this month (Gameosity)
- Company Updates
My forthcoming "Littoral Commander: Japan" will feature a two-set map covering the Japanese Southwest Islands – from Amami Island to Yonaguni. What kind of scenarios do people want to see? 😁 🎲 #wargaming
— Sebastian Bae (@sebastianbae.bsky.social) 2026-07-06T23:25:52.685Z
Articles, advice, and ideas for those of you on the creative side
- Skeleton Code Machine talks about breaking up the game into multiple chapters or “acts”
- Brooks Barber examines some recent discourse about design, with links to other interesting discussions
- This is What Separates Great Games from the Rest
- The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Game Designers (part 2)
- The Structure of Player Choices in Board Games
I'm thinking of writing some design diaries and I find it helpful to have specific questions to answer. So what would you like to know about the experience of designing asymmetric, political and/or historical games?
— Sam Francis (Samphire Games) (@tzartzam.bsky.social) 2026-07-05T13:37:24.193Z
Don’t forget to check our consolidated event & convention calendar for more!
You can also submit your own events for our calendar here.
Our Next Armchair Dragoons Events
- Wargame Days at The Gamer’s Armory in Cary, NC ~July 122 , August 2 and September 6
- Next confirmed live event is The Armchair Dragoons Fall Assembly (Cary NC), 9-11 October 2026
- Next virtual event is The ACDC 15-17 January 2027
Upcoming Conventions & Events
- 10-16 Jul Consimexpo (Tempe AZ)
- 11-12 Jul SDHistCon North 2026 (Minneapolis MN)
- 15-19 Jul Historicon (with SPI’s Alive!) (Lancaster PA)
- 24 Jul-1 Aug World Boardgaming Championships (Seven Springs PA)
- 30 Jul-3 Aug GenCon (Indianapolis IN)
- 31 Jul-2 Aug Southern Fried Gaming Expo (Atlanta GA)
- 21-23 Aug Dragonflight Con (Bellevue WA)
- 3-7 Sep DragonCon (Atlanta GA)
- 4-7 Sep Gateway 2026 (Los Angeles CA)
- 5-9 Sep World Series of Board Gaming (Las Vegas NV)
- 18-20 Sep Southern Front (Morrisville NC)
- 24-27 Sep 6ᵉ Open de France des Jeux d’Histoire (Bordeaux France)
Focusing on the practitioner world ~ don’t forget about the dedicated area in our forums for the wargame professionals and the separate “practitioner” category for articles on our site
Tickets are live for Connections UK, 9-10 September, at Brunel University
Wargaming News & Articles for the Pros
- Space Force War Game Pits 2 Satellites Against Each Other in Orbit (Gizmodo)
- Pentagon pays RAND to model wars before they happen (Defence Blog)
- “Crimean Wake-Up”: Russian Officers War-Game Ukraine Landing in Annexed Crimea (United 24 Media)
- Upcoming PGS/MORS events
- 22–25 September – Wargaming Emerging Technologies Workshop
- 19–23 October – Certificate in Wargaming
- 3–5 November – Designing Tactical Games Course
- 17–19 November – Gaming Space Operations Course
- The next GUWS webinars
- Get Hired! Constellation West has a posting for a Wargaming Practitioner at Offutt AFB in Nebraska
Something neat from outside the wargaming world we thought was worth sharing
That’s all for this week!
You can chat about the news in the Intel Dump in our discussion forums and next Tuesday we return with another update for you
Thank you for visiting the Regiment of Strategy Gaming and riding with The Armchair Dragoons.
Rather than list a bunch of social media links, the easiest thing to do is to check out our LinkTree, which connects you to all of our various locales around the web.
You can also support The Armchair Dragoons through our Patreon, and find us at a variety of conventions and other events.
Feel free to talk back to us either in our discussion forum, or in the comments below.
